Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Silicon Valley Needs a Foreign Policy

Wilson III,  Ernest J. "Silicon Valley Needs a Foreign Policy." Foreign Affairs, June 20, 2012.
  
From the article: "As California's high-tech firms grew to become economic powerhouses in the American economy, they punched below their weight politically. For the most part, they not very savvy about the ways of Washington -- they came late to the lobbying game -- and their political strategies were naïve compared with those of old industrial sectors like oil and automobiles.

That seems to be changing… SOPA's defeat has been held up as a triumph for Internet freedom. But in combination with a few earlier examples, including Google's 2010 courageous but lonely stance against the People's Republic of China, it represents something more transformational. January's legislative battle marked the first time the major U.S. tech firms and their friends and followers came together and leveraged their political might like the globalized, information-age colossus that they have been for a long time. "Read more